


mistakes aren't always regrets

by MasterOfAllImagination



Series: happily never after the after [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 01:49:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14033523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: “Yeah, I mean, sure, pure theory is great,” Newton had jabbered, towards the start of your working relationship, many years ago; “and knowing how a wormhole works is super tight—but one day, when we can use that theory tocreatewormholes?”Newton arrays ten fingers around his temples and then releases them, miming an explosion. “Then, my friend, you can talk to me about the ‘beauty of abstraction,’ or whatever.”“Oh, fuck off,” you’d muttered, but the damn thing is, he’d been right.





	mistakes aren't always regrets

**Author's Note:**

> Formerly known as "happily never after the after," which I have now appropriated as the series title.

There comes a point beyond which the numbers cease to count and begin to speak.

On good days, that point comes quickly; like sliding your arms into silk lined suit sleeves.  You stand before an analog board, white marks against green. Their color binary forms images as vivid as the black-on-white of a novel.

On bad days: well. Chalk _scrapes_ against boards, too.

“Hermann,” comes Newton’s voice, splicing through a bad day. “You look like you could use a can of oil.”

You turn, lacking anything truly compelling in front of you, leg twinging from too long spent stationary.  “I’m sorry?”

“Tin Man?”

Your eyebrows contract lightly.

“C’mon, man. Wizard of Oz? Seriously?” Your lab partner throws up his arms at your befuddlement.  “I thought everyone watched that when they were a kid.”

“Yes, well.” You aren’t in the mood to open up the argument waiting, for everything between you and him is an argument _in potentia_. The morning breakfast selection? A low-brow debate over the merits of a bagel’s empty carbs relative to its belly-filling properties, and it feeds you yet leaves you unsatisfied in exactly the same way.  Funding reallocation? Twenty-three minutes of barbs passed across a yellow-painted line, their sticking power long since blunted by repeated blows, and they propel you in the same way the money seems to be spent faster the less of it you’re given.  

Newton is setting down a disgusting scalpel and stepping towards your half of the lab. “You okay, man?”

“I am—” your fist snaps the chalk it holds, a small crack muffled by flesh—“ _fine_ , Doctor Geiszler,” you say, the title as effective at pushing the man back as the tip of your cane against his sternum would have been. Today, it is not needed, and Zeus hands down his box, but Pandora will wait a bit longer to rend its lid.

Work continues.

There are five days until the next breach event and there are four Jaegers in a Shatterdome that once held four score and seven pilots who wait so impatiently for the days to return to zero.

Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers—there are two more pilots coming in two more days—you could write a short recursion with the numbers of pilots per days left on the clock divided by Jaegers, resulting in a rate of dwindling returns.  To do this would mean not having to look back at the mass of chalk that grates your mind like its instrument grates against the board.

Behind you, Newton shuffles back to his entrails, a certain lankness to his shoulders. His head turns slightly. You snap your gaze away.

 

_What a pissant,_ Newton had thought, in that moment _, I was just trying to be nice, why does he always snap when I’m_ nice _?_

Then the flash of car headlights and someone saying  _gratulation zu Ihrer Promotion—_

A woman undressing and a teacher handing back a failing grade, laughter; a ten-year-old Mako Mori’s feet rattling the metal floor grating as she runs by 

 

\--and yet, in the six-point-eight milliseconds it takes for you and your—your—(you struggle for the term; slotting one after the other into the last empty space of a jigsaw, but not a single one will perfectly close that frustrating gap)

\--you and your _Newton_ to fall into drift together, that conversation from a week ago in the lab is the one you focus on for the longest; longest here being a completely qualitative classification, for quantitative analysis fails when you’re standing in the middle of a quarantine zone in the middle of Hong Kong in the middle of what could only be God’s best attempt at bringing about the Book of Revelation. 

Quantitative analysis fails. As a scientist, this is worrying. As a human being, which you certainly _are_ , thank-you-very-much, _Newton_ ; it is a little more parseable. There are some things for which evolution has not yet prepared the human mind. Some of them are inexplicable: why do certain people avoid any precipice higher than a diving board, yet others hike mountain peaks and then lean over in awe, chasing the irrational-yet-rational urge to maybe just lean a bit farther and fall?

“Yeah, I mean, sure, pure theory is great,” Newton had jabbered, towards the start of your working relationship, many years ago; “and knowing how a wormhole works is super tight—but one day, when we can use that theory to _create_ wormholes?”

Newton arrays ten fingers around his temples and then releases them, miming an explosion. “ _Then_ , my friend, you can talk to me about the ‘beauty of abstraction,’ or whatever.”

“Oh, fuck off,” you’d muttered, but the damn thing is, he’d been right.

_Knowing_ how the breach had been created in space-time hadn’t done them a damn bit of good until they’d been able to use that knowledge to _un_ -create it. 

Chickens and eggs.

Jaegers and Kaijus.

You and him.

Him and you.

 

There’s a bag clutched in his hand. You look it over and measure for size and bulk. Large enough to hold his laptop; too small to hold his clothes. He wouldn’t leave without taking his beloved atrocious clothes. You readjust your cane to better suit the perforated floor and relax your shoulders.  Not many have left, yet—who would have thought cleaning up after the apocalypse would be more work than averting it—but some have. Some still will.

“What’s,” you start, before you can help yourself, “in the bag.” Flat delivery. Not choked off soon enough for the disinterest you’d been grasping for.

 

_Grasping for a strand just out of reach in the roller coaster of drift, like your uncle (his uncle?) dropping a dollar bill through your scissored fingers over and over; your cries of childish frustration when you fail to snag it over and over—it is just around the corner of the lab and it is just inside the lining of your own mind—a string pulled from both ends has exerted upon itself the same force as if being pulled from a tethered side—_

_but then_

_Them._

“Hermann.” The hand shakes you again. The hand that isn’t holding the bag. “Buddy. You okay?”

You come back to this universe with a jolt and temporarily see nothing. Because it is a practiced motion, you pull your glasses from your eyes and pinch the bridge of your nose before replacing them, though the pinch in actuality causes more pain than it replaces. “What was I saying?”

“You asked me what was in my bag.”

“Did you answer?”

“Yeah.”

The hand is still on your shoulder. You glance at it. It falls away.

“And?”

Uneasily, Newton shuffles aside. “Just some stuff. I’m taking it down to the lab. You going my way?”

“….To the lab?”

“That’s. What I said.” He steps in again. “Dude, are you _sure_ —”

You push away the hand that never rises to touch you, swatting air. “Leave me alone.”

He does.

 

You see (you do, indeed, _see_ , now); it isn’t that Newton ever found any flaw within yourself truly irritating. The drift revealed no hatred.  You had sometimes speculated. You had sometimes postulated. But, now, you know--the square root of a negative number made rational--that no one else in this world truly relishes the push and the pull and the give and the take and the stab and the wound and the give and the get of an argument as much as you do, except _him_. 

 

It is Alaska, or perhaps it is Sydney, or perhaps it is Hong Kong. They all blur into Hong Kong, afterwards. Newton hands you the bottle of moonshine, both _bottle_ and _moonshine_ being generous descriptors.  It must be Sydney because the back of his hand does not yet bear the acid scars, the smell of which at the time of infliction still sometimes clogs up your nostrils; the vertigo of your cane hitting the floor as you spin at his cry and then grasping for said cane and finding it gone when you try to go to him.

You sip mincingly, and swallow.

“Sometimes,” he whispers, throat gone raw at perhaps more than just the distilled vegetable swill, “I’m glad they came. The Kaiju,” he adds, as if this needed clarification.

For _this_ , you need another drink. You take it and wait.

“Because the way I figure it, if _they’re_ out there, it means we’re not alone. Right?” He turns to you. “And maybe there’s more of them. Not Kaiju. God I hope—" a hiccup— “not all the aliens are like them. But. Nice ones. You know what I mean.”

And it might just be the drink talking, or probably not, but you say, “I suppose you mean like Eccentrica Gallumbits,” and Newton laughs until he cries. 

 

You have braced and braced your whole life for the last good day to come, but how does one quantify the last of anything until the data set has been completed?

You have been waiting to stop waiting for a very, very, very long time. You are not sure how to hope again.

It takes the heavy thumping slice of helicopter blades to cut it out of you. It is not hope—not quite yet—but it is close to it: it is a wanting of something that isn’t mere survival, a desperation for something that isn’t respite; a need so strong for something that isn’t germane to everyday sustenance that the force of it is enough to cripple you for a second time; and far more debilitatingly than a janky knee.

“Fuck,” you swear, as your rubber-tipped cane slips on the wet platform. “Wait, wait—” annoyance in your voice more than a demand; but the figure in front of you is not looking back. “ _Wait!”_ you shout again, and perhaps it is the propeller blades, or the drumming rain, or perhaps it is sheer stubbornness.

The man’s middle name might as well be stubbornness, although you now know it full well to be Muybridge.

 

_absolute_

_catastrophic_

_panic._

_as a tongue reaches out towards you_

_and all you can think about is your arms, and how they once were beautiful; how you had taken that which frightened you and given it a new purpose; and thus conquered it—_

_and how they never, hereafter, will be beautiful again._

“ _Newton!_ ” you shout, as loud and as angry and as furiously as you can, and maybe—maybe as _else_ as you can, something in your mind; something you’d had access to for six-point-eight milliseconds and then lost forever.

He turns.

In the rain, his white (grubby; unwashed) shirtsleeves have drenched and stuck to his skin, revealing the tattoos beneath. He plucks at them idly. They stick again as soon as they’ve been pulled away and there is nothing soft in his eyes as he looks at you.

(but nor any hatred.)

You take a breath.  You have carefully prepared the words you calculate have the best chance of making him stay. “We once thought the cosmos extended no farther than the upper edges of our atmosphere, and that the whole of space was like—a mural painted in a spherical room, just for us. And then Aristotle came with numbers and proof and told us instead that space is actually a vast chamber in which we are the central fulcrum. And then—”

Newton's gaze fidgets. You’re losing your audience. You put up a hand. “No, hear me out—and then Copernicus, as you know; he postulates the heliocentric model, and shifts the paradigm, but you see—”

Rain, rain, rain; it won’t stop and it’s blurring your vision; you must blink very rapidly to see.

“If Aristotle had never been wrong, what would Copernicus have had to prove right?”

There is nothing soft in Newton’s eyes as he looks at you. So you reach out your hand, the one that isn’t holding your cane, and place it on his cold and sodden forearm; the one that is holding his umbrella, currently, above you both. The wet material resists when you try to rub it between two fingers.

Newton releases a breath. “It’s a good position, Hermann. I’m going to. I’m. I want the position.”

“Yes. Good. Okay.” You release his shirt. “Best of luck to you, then.” A salute is the first thing that comes to mind. You touch your brow, smartly, and look straight ahead; the differences in your heights puts your eyes at his forehead.

“You too, Hermann,” Newton says, and you never see if there is anything soft in his eyes, or even if he looks at you.

 

_We stand upon the shoulders of giants_ , you wish you’d said to him. Maybe you had, once; but you can’t remember anymore. _We were not strong enough to fight the Kaiju on our own, so we made giants.  Copernicus could not have understood the cosmos without Aristotle’s mistakes to guide him._

You wish you’d said to him, _you would never have thought to drift with a Kaiju if you had not loved them first_.

 

From a continent away, you think of how much you had both loved to argue, and you relive six-point-eight milliseconds over and over again for nine weeks. Nine weeks is sixty-three days multiplied into hours divided into minutes and seconds and milliseconds; if you relived the entirety of the drift constantly for those milliseconds multiplied into minutes and into hours and days and weeks you would arrive at precisely one (1) specially derived circle of lonely hell of which Dante could only slaver over.

Neither of you were ever sorry. There is guilt and there is regret and there is—more—there is the unknowable _strand_ —but there is never I-am-sorry, neither in word nor feeling.

At least, there was not in those milliseconds.

Because the wanting doesn’t go away. The helicopter takes off and Newton dons protective headphones and stares and stares at the ground, at the Shatterdome, even at you; but the helicopter takes off and your wanting stretches out like a viscous membrane intent on retaining elasticity even at the utter apex of pain. Because sometimes you glance down at your left hand and startle to see it unmarked by both acid and by ink. Because if the sorry was the only thing you never said, then perhaps it is the only thing still left to be done.

 

He’s lecturing. Nine weeks in and he’s stuck to the job and he’s lecturing. The sign outside the lecture hall says _Maximum Capacity 258_ and there must be at least twice that number jammed into the space, hung along the walls like too many clothes in a closet, the ones lucky enough to have chairs all perched on their edges; some taking notes and some just staring hungrily as Newton gestures and speaks and speaks and gestures almost too quickly for comprehension.

_Almost_.

There will now never be a time when you cannot understand him.

You move out of the door and bang a few shins with your cane to clear a path. “Excuse me. Yes, you; please move, can’t you see I’m physically disabled?”  It takes until you are standing almost at the front of the lecture hall itself for him to notice you, and the addition of your body has rendered the space a stage; you two the players and four hundred undergraduates your audience.

His gesticulating arms, covered in long grey sleeves, fall to his sides. His nasally voice drops off precipitously before morphing, with a tonal scoop, into a demand. “What are _you_ doing here?”

Offense fits you like a startled bird whose feathers stiffen; or a dog whose scruff stands on end just before barking. “I think the better question is what _you_ are doing _here_ ,” you say, indicating the room at large with your cane. “How pathetic. Really, Newton; I expected better from you. I was under the impression that they allocated larger halls to introductory classes, but clearly that is a strictly European practice.”

 Newton throws down his laser pointer. “You son of a bitch.”

“Please, this is between you and me and your C-average communications majors; let’s leave my mother—”

“I’ll bring your mother into this if I want to! I’ll—” He stalks forward, rolling up his sleeves.

A murmur rises among the crowd that has not yet been provoked by your assaults on their intelligence. How great is the cognitive dissonance engendered by seeing the very devils a man spent a career trying to slay then etched artfully upon his arms?  It must be large: as if Van Helsing wore a cameo of Dracula around his neck on a ribbon.  You wouldn't know. You have long since bridged that abyss.  

You smile. “Oh, please,” you murmur. “Oh, please fight me. Please please please.” You close your eyes, just in case he really hits you; and—

 

_\--you look up from Copernicus’s_ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium _in its original Latin to see, in the span of .04 milliseconds, a ragged man standing over you._

_“You’re Gottlieb, aren’t you?”_

_“Yes,” you say,_ and you’re rather rude _, you think, caught between wanting to close the book in frustration and not wanting it to be misinterpreted as an invitation to conversation._

_The disheveled man smiles blindingly and continues blithely. “Boy, if I’da known you were pulling material from the sixteenth century, I might not have bothered showing up for this talk of yours.”_

_“We stand,” you say, with infinite patience, because you are here at this convention for nothing if not to educate, “on the shoulders of giants. And you are?”_

_“Newton Geiszler. But you should definitely call me Newt.”_

_Finally, you put the book down._

He’s just standing there before you. There is no hatred in his eyes.

“Newt,” you say, and your too-tight grip on your cane makes it tremble. “Newton,” you correct. “I am. I am very, very sorry, and I am also sorry that I have not ever said that I am sorry. Before this.”

For no fathomable reason, Newton removes his glasses, and you look into wide and wet eyes in a sickening minute of suspension, and the wanting reverberates between you.

Newton reaches out with two hands to grasp your lapels so he can bring his forehead to rest against your sternum.  Sometime during the choreograph of this movement the glasses are dropped, and his arms are still bare. Around them, a guttering and out-of-place clapping picks up momentum.

“I wish I could still be Aristotle,” Newt says, muffled into your shirt and for your ears alone.

 You press your lips so hard and so desperate into his hair that you can barely speak.

“Fuck Aristotle,” you say, and there, at last, for the first time since the quarantine zone in Hong Kong in the middle of the apocalypse, you and he stand alone together.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to pour out a measure of whatever CWR's drink of choice is or was and raise a toast. If I am now or ever among the stars, it will be partially because I had your moon to reach for, and I thank you.


End file.
